


A Game for Scholars

by toujours_nigel



Category: The Lion in Winter (1968)
Genre: Blood, Blood and Injury, F/M, Kinktober, Knifeplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 19:58:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16182119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: The last and most surprising of Eleanor's visitors is her husband.





	A Game for Scholars

The last and most surprising of Eleanor’s visitors is her husband, and anything that might say about their marriage she has heard and said and thought a thousand times. At least it isn’t Philip, who looks like his father and acts like a son Henry might have sired and she borne, raised, loved. A strange spectre of her youth to meet at the crossroads with all roads closing against her.

Henry at least is familiar, answering smile for smile when she greets him with, “I’m not riding out at this time of night.”

“I wouldn’t dream of turning you loose before the boys are gone,” he tells her, taking possession of the chair nearest the fire. He still sits in it like he’d been used to when she’d first met him and he’d been a boy, one leg slung across an arm, his head tipping over the other. It had infuriated his mother. It’s well on its way to infuriating her.

“I thought they’d run already. I would have, had I been younger.” Her ladies had been packing her trunks in the inner room when he’d started knocking; they’ve gone quiet as wraiths since, not even the tinkling of her jewellery to be heard.

“Yes, I know. You did. Geoffrey’s going first, with Philip. We can’t detain _him_ much longer without trouble.”

“Are you trying to create trouble for Richard?”

Henry smiles again, the corner of his mouth lifting over his teeth. “Would it, do you think? Is your Richard so soft?”

 _Her_ Richard still, as though he wouldn’t crawl through broken glass for his father. If he sinks his claws in further he'll know how true it is. She shakes out her sleeves over her hands and palms the hilt of her knife: antler and polished bone, lovely, deadly. “He slaughters with distinction but has retained a heart.”

“I am informed it poses an obstacle,” Henry says cheerily, and startles when she laughs. Good, he still has some sense of when to be scared.

“It would be in Angevin tradition, if he and Geoffrey fought,” she says, and touches his hair with her free hand. It’s longer than it used to be, and browner, and duller. He had been a well-looking man in those days, and she might have bedded him even without the county to join to her own lands, for love or simple boredom. “It would even be tradition, for the usurper to be Geoffrey.”

“You knew. How did you know?”

“Your mother told me. She wasn’t at court as often as your father, but we were friends for years before you ever laid eyes on me.”

His lip curls up again, this time baring his teeth in a snarl. “It was a balm to her to have a companion so near her age.”

“She grieved when your father died,” Eleanor says, and sinks the hand in his hair, tilting his head back and baring his throat. “I wonder whether I will when it is you.”

“You’ll be too busy with Richard’s coronation.”

“Are you so sure it’ll be him?”

Henry shrugs. “It was very nearly our oldest boy, but he went into the ground before I did. If it is Geoffrey it’ll still be Richard. If it is John... my poor Johnny.”

She was Queen of France when she met him, duchess of Aquitaine when he was a child, a name to set the world trembling. All he thought of, alone in a room with her, knowing her his steadfast enemy, were the sons who couldn’t finish the job even banded together. It was the same with his mother: Holy Roman Empress, Countess, fugitive Queen, and all anyone remembered was that her father, husband, and favoured son had the same name. It was all anyone thought of, what sons women birthed and husbands they bedded and fathers they buried. She is so tired, of the drudgery of it, of the whispers and the machinations and the movement of wealth and people and influence, and never being turned loose, always being sheltered, protected, imprisoned.

“Henry,” she says as gently as she can, and shakes him by the hair when he laughs. “Henry, dear, you know I would never let anyone else kill you and deprive me of the pleasure.”

“Eleanor, you never will. You like tormenting me far too much.”

“I do,” she agrees, and boxes him into the chair with her body. She is older and frailer than him, she could never lift his longsword. But his feet are dangling above the ground and she is holding him by the hair and she has been quick with a knife since her uncle put the first in her hand. Blood wells from the swift shallow cut underneath his eye, and she inks her blade in it and draws it down over his cheek to the pulse leaping in the hollow of his throat.

“Eleanor,” he whispers, and good, good, he remembers to be scared of her, he remembers that she is in the room with him, that to take his eyes from her is to turn his back on the oldest of his enemies.

“I could peel you like a pear,” she says, and pulls the knife over his throat, careful not to draw blood, and up his other cheek, rests the point at the edge of his eye. “Shall I blind you, Henry? They say justice is, and you were so keen to dole justice out to your peasants. How strange, when you have so little of it to offer your sons, your wife.”

He raises a hand and drops it when she sways into him, the blade pressing deeper, drawing blood. “You wouldn’t kill me.”

“It would only give me control of Aquitaine. It would only put Richard on the throne. Are you willing to wager your life that I love you more than my lands and my son?”

“ _Eleanor_ ,” he says, his hand on her elbow and dragging her arm down, drawing blood across his cheek and over his jaw, his other arm around her waist. “Eleanor, I always have.”


End file.
